


The Next Stop is the Last Stop

by Anna__S



Category: The Mindy Project
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-08
Updated: 2014-09-08
Packaged: 2018-02-16 16:16:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2276280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anna__S/pseuds/Anna__S
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Danny tried to read his book and one time he did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Next Stop is the Last Stop

**Author's Note:**

> Starting around the beginning of Season 1 and ending sometime shortly after You’ve Got Sext. 
> 
> Just a bit of nonsense to tide me over to to the premiere. It's been a long summer.

 

 

  

_One._

He heard her music first.  Mindy was bouncing her feet to it, so lightly that he doubted she realized she was doing it.  Her eyes were closed and he took this as his opportunity to sneak behind her. But as he passed her, she opened her eyes, and smiled. 

“Danny!” she said, as if he had not been caught in the act of escape.

“Mindy,” he said, nodding at her, but not making complete eye contact.  He didn’t know how he’d missed her when he first got on; she was dressed like a bumblebee.

“How was your last delivery?” she asked, taking off her headphones and removing any chance Danny had of a quiet commute.

“Nine pound boy,” he said. “Just under three hours,” he couldn’t resist adding because, well frankly, that was pretty damn good.

“Nice!” she said.  “That’s less time than than it took my date from last night to tell me he wasn’t feeling it.” 

 “Sorry,” he said shortly. 

 She raised her shoulders in a what-are-you-going-to-do-about-it gesture.

“His loss. Besides, that’s the great thing about New York, Danny, the next guy’s always around the corner.” 

“ _That’s_ the great thing about New York?” 

But she continued, “everywhere else, people travel in their little bubbles, but here, you can meet somebody new anywhere you go. My next boyfriend could be on this very car, trying to make eye contact with a mysterious hot Indian girl right now.” 

“So maybe you shouldn’t be talking to me,” he mumbled, but she pretended she didn’t hear him, and continued on in what he considered her most irritating narrator-mode, and that was saying something.

When he got home, there was already a text from her, _Thanks for keeping me company. It was a rough day._

 _What are you talking about,_ he responded. 

_The subway ride we literally just took, are you going senile?_

_Yeah, you, me and dozen other people._

_Danny, don't be ridiculous, I'm not texting any of those people, am I._

He sighed and didn’t write back. 

 

* * *

 

 

_Two._

 

He had seriously considered walking to work to avoid her, but then she would be at work, so it was only putting off the inevitable. Besides, he decided, she was the one who should be avoiding him.  

But Danny was so distracted that he forgot one of the first tenets of commuting: a semi-empty subway car during rush hour meant either that the air conditioning was broken, somebody recently peed in it, or if you were really lucky, like today, both.  

There were two empty seats, one next to her, and the other two seats away. Without looking at her, he sat down in the seat farther away.

“Uh, what’s your damage, Castellano?”

He studiously ignored her. 

 “So, now you’re giving me the silent treatment, what are we five?”

The dignified looking elderly woman sitting between them continued to stare straight ahead, as if that might make the two of them disappear.  Mindy leaned further around her in order to peer at him.

“I’m just trying to enjoy my commute in peace,” he said.

Their seatmate finally abandoned her attempt to pretend they didn’t exist and stood up, shooting them both a sharp glare that reminded Danny uncomfortably of the nuns at his catholic school. Unperturbed, Mindy immediately scooted into her seat and Danny bit back a groan.

“I’m sorry about last night,” she offered. “I mean, you should’ve talked to Alex about your ex-wife, that’s kind of crazy, but I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“Or brought a prostitute as my date,” she added. “Although Danny, this isn’t the 1800s, it’s not like he had consumption or something. You’re a doctor, you really shouldn’t have such old-fashioned views.” 

“You really can’t stop defending yourself can you?” he snapped.  

She continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “And you were, frankly, a bit of a dick too. You shouldn’t talk to your friends that way,” she said, emphasizing _friends_ as if she was daring him to defy her. 

“You can’t just _make_ somebody your friend, Mindy. It’s a two way street,” he said forcefully, although that didn’t seem to quite correspond to his experiences with her so far. Maybe this was a form of Stockholm Syndrome, except instead of kidnapping him, she just was around all the time, and at a certain point, you had to give in and read the manifesto.  Although Mindy’s manifesto would probably be one of those dumb women’s magazines teaching you twenty ways to catch a man at the mall. 

“We’ll see,” she said brightly. 

Mindy shifted next to him. “Ugh, the plastic seats are sticking to my legs.”  She tried, unsuccessfully, to pull her bright green skirt down and he looked down to see a long-expanse of dark skin and immediately wished he hadn’t. 

Then she was up, tugging at him. “It’s our stop, Danny,” she said, and he didn’t quite understand how she had managed to defuse their fight, but there he was, walking out with her, like it was any other day.

 

* * *

 

 

_Three._

 

“The train is delayed due to train traffic ahead,” boomed the conductor. 

Mindy groaned loudly and he tried to shrink away from her.  

"We've already been sitting here for fifteen minutes," she said, gesturing wildly with her hands, in a manner distinctly reminiscent of his Aunt Gloria.  

"You have another date with that guy...Sean?" he asked.

 "John," she corrected him, but it took her half a beat too long, and he could tell she wasn't sure.  

The conductor’s garbled voice broke through again: _Due to a sick passenger in the train ahead of us, this train is being held._   All down the car, commuters grumbled. 

"You've gotta be kidding me," Mindy said.  She turned and glared at him, as if to signal that this was his fault.  “I don’t have time for this.” 

"You're not the only one in a rush," he said.

"What, is there another Bruce Springsteen biopic on TV? How many songs about New Jersey can one man write, Danny? It's New Jersey! It's basically a glorified trash dump."

"Maybe I have a date too," he said, choosing not to rise to the Springsteen bait. 

She looked irritated, then intrigued, then irritated again.

"Yeah, but how long can it take you to get ready? All of your shirts look identical and I'm pretty sure you were born with that exact haircut."  But she leaned closer to him, and he realized with alarm, that he was stuck with her in a confined space and he had just given her a topic to latch onto.

"What _do_ you do to prepare for a date?” she asked.  

He wanted to say, c'mon you don't really want to know that, but he knew that weirdly, she did.  She always treated him like his life would be the subject of a test someday and it was absolutely essential that she be prepared. 

"You know, I shower, and uh, comb my hair," he said, "make my bed, clean up my place?"  As soon as he said it, he realized it sounded a little more bow chicka wow wow than he intended.  

"That seems a little presumptuous of you, Danny," she said with a smirk.  

"You don't?" he asked, crossing his arms.  

“Not for a second date,” she said, the _duh_ unspoken, as if he’d just suggested that she should show up to her date stark naked. “I mean, a messy apartment, unshaven legs, granny panties – these are the last defenses of a single woman.”

“Defenses,” he repeated slowly.

“So the guy can’t come over.” 

“You can’t just…say no?”

“The point is, I don’t want to say no,” she said, now looking at him pityingly.

“So say yes,” he offered. 

“Then he might get the wrong idea,” she said.

He shook his head and exhaled.  “Oh boy.”

She touched the back of his hand, and looked at him with big, solemn eyes. “Danny, if you don’t think every woman you date is thinking the exact same way, you’re kidding yourself.” 

There were a lot of potential responses to that, and he paused, trying to decide which one fell into the appropriate place on the offensiveness scale.       

The car lurched forward, sending her sliding into him.

“Thank god!” she said and he didn’t usually like to take the lord’s name in vain, but he kind of had to agree.

 

* * *

 

_Four._

 

His fingers closed around the handrail just as the subway moved.  Mindy had already wrapped herself around the entire pole and was dangling around it, humming something.  Danny swallowed a yawn.

The guy seated closest to them was eating something with a fried, overwhelming smell.  Danny thought he could actually taste the MSG in the air.

"That's so rude," Mindy hissed at Danny. "Like, wait until you get home, buddy. Don't inflict your weird-smelling food on us."

Danny glared at her, but luckily, the culprit was too immersed in his Styrofoam container to notice the looks being aimed in his direction.  She sighed dramatically, her elbow crooked around the pole as she continued to make small circles back and forth.

Swinging closer to him, she poked him in the side, "Danny?"

“That’s really bad subway etiquette you know. You’re hogging the whole thing. It’s rude,” he said. 

“Danny, it’s midnight on a Tuesday. The rest of the world is asleep. I think maybe we can afford to bend the sacred rules of subway riding, just this once.” 

“Hmm,” he said and tried very hard to focus on the book he had balanced precariously between him and the door. 

“Danny,” she repeated. 

He closed his book. He knew a lost cause when he saw one.  "You're hungry," he said.

She smiled and nodded. "Thai?" she suggested.  

He almost pointed out that it had been a long week, that he had just eaten three meals in a row with his colleagues, and maybe he just wanted to go home, throw together a turkey sandwich and eat in the peace and quiet of his living room. But he remembered, with a pang, that she had kept him company after the Christina debacle and he really didn't like being in people’s debt.  And he was hungry. 

"Pizza," he said firmly.  

The next stop was his stop, and he got out behind her, guiding her to the entrance at the left. She made a sort of funny face at him, but she didn’t say anything.

He knew that his habit of touching people didn’t quite fit with his not so touchy-feely personality, but it was a tendency left over from a childhood spent in an exuberant, extended Italian family, who had been huggers and kissers, who had always touched each other on the shoulder no matter what they were saying. It was like a vestigial limb left over from some warmer, kinder version of him and he couldn’t quite shake it. He wasn’t even sure if he wanted to. 

 

 

* * *

 

 

_Five._

 

He allowed her to take the only seat, while he hung onto the closest handrail, like the chivalrous gentleman that he occasionally was. Mindy let out an ugly, snotty, wet noise that was halfway between a sob and a snort. The teenage boy sitting next to her looked up in alarm and fled, which Danny thought showed good judgment. 

She patted the seat next to her and he sat down, somewhat reluctantly. 

“Don’t say anything,” she warned him.  He opened his mouth and closed it, once and then again, but settled for nudging her on the shoulder.

She glanced at him and her eyes were red-rimmed and tired, her make-up streaked in a telltale fashion. If he had been a real gentleman, he would’ve been able to offer her a handkerchief, or at least a napkin or something. Instead, he nudged her again, harder, and she looked up, annoyed, but maybe also amused.

“I told you to be quiet,” she warned, but when she saw the book in his hand, she laughed.

“God, you still haven’t finished this, Danny?  Haven’t they made like three different movie versions of these already?”

“Some people prefer reading,” he said, mostly because there were a million jokes she could have made at his expense. But she didn’t. She just rested her head on his shoulder.

 _Casey’s an idiot_ , he wanted to say, although he knew that wasn’t true, or _he wasn’t good enough for you_ , but that seemed verging on too girly, too intimate, like maybe he knew what would be good enough.

“You’re gonna be okay,” he said and meant it.  He glanced down at her face and saw her eyes were closed. His shoulder was damp where her mouth was. He closed his eyes too.

They both missed their stop. 

 

* * *

 

_Six._

“Hey, you still haven’t told me which of the hotels in LA you prefer.”

“I really don’t have an opinion, Min.” He leaned against the pole so the cold metal nipped at his neck.  

She narrowed her eyes at him.  “You don’t like hotels very much do you.”

He shrugged. “I just, I prefer being home, in my space. I don’t like how people are always coming in and out.”

“God, I love hotels,” she said and he nodded, because, yes of course she did. Danny could picture her hotel room perfectly and it made him cringe to imagine his mother seeing it, his mother cleaning it. When he was in a hotel, he could never shake the feeling that he was on the wrong side of the desk.

And then over Mindy’s shoulder, he saw a familiar-looking face and couldn't control the groan that escaped from his mouth. 

“Who is it?” Mindy asked, her head whipping around.

“Shh,” he said in a hushed tone. “It’s just…an ex. We didn’t end on great terms.”

Mindy’s eyes brightened, looking a little too pleased.  “Do you want me to pretend to be your girlfriend again?”

Before he could point out that this wouldn’t help anything, she had looped her arm around him and turned both of them around, so they faced the opposite direction, her nose nearly nuzzling his neck.

“This is officially happening too often, Danny,” she said in an exaggerated whisper. “What do you do to these women?” Something about the way she emphasized _do_ made him smirk.  

"Shut up, you know that's not what I meant," she said, her cheeks darkening, which only made him grin more.  

“Read your stupid book,” she said, poking her finger into the cover.

“Okay,” he agreed and he opened it to the spot marked by the bookmark. She settled her chin on his shoulder and mouthed the words along with him. The subway car rattled along, emptying out, but she stayed where she was. 

 

 

 

 


End file.
